big bang

Category archives for big bang

“The paradigm of physics — with its interplay of data, theory and prediction — is the most powerful in science.” –Geoffrey West So earlier this year, the BICEP2 team shook up the world by announcing the discovery of primordial gravitational waves: a signal from the earliest stages of the Universe, going all the way back to before the Big Bang!…

Sure, the Big Bang is great. Going back to very early times, it tells us the Universe was in a hot, dense state, where even the possibility of forming neutral atoms was impossible due to the incredible energies of the Universe at that time. The patterns of fluctuations that are left over from that time…

“I think one of the coolest things you can do is disappear for a while, because it gives you the chance to re-emerge.” –Josh Homme The Big Bang — and General Relativity in general — teaches us that in an expanding Universe, it’s the fabric of space itself that evolves over time. One of the…

“Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.” –Ovid With all that we know of astronomy, with the hundreds of billions of galaxies and hundreds of billions of stars in each that we know are there, it might surprise you to learn that the stars — for the most part…

“We were marching down the street, & we were at the head of the troops. We went on marching, & the troops went off to the left.” –Geoffrey Burbidge It’s such a part of our cosmic and scientific history, that it’s difficult to remember that it’s only been for the past 50 years that the…

“The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.” –Oliver Wendell Holmes But it isn’t just your mind that expands as time goes on and you increase your knowledge, but the entire Universe as well. General Relativity, as it turns out, doesn’t leave us with much of a…

“It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. It’s a crazy world out there. Be curious.” –Stephen Hawking The story of where everything came from in the Universe — of how we came from empty, expanding space to…

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” –Carl Sagan That might be true: all the heavy elements — in theory — were created after at least one generation…

“Whenever you have infinities in a theory, that’s where the theory fails as a description of nature. And if space was born in the Big Bang, yet is infinite now, we are forced to believe that it’s instantaneously, infinitely big. It seems absurd.” –Janna Levin Of course, we don’t believe space was born in the Big…

“Science casts a long black shadow back over who we think we are, and where it falls the temperature falls with it. Its touch is chilly and unforgiving.” –Richard K. Morgan Here on Earth, when we’re dealing with normal matter, it’s relatively easy to measure the temperature of something. Even if you don’t have a thermometer…